Celebrity Home Secrets: Janet Street-Porter revisits childhood home

Journalist, broadcaster and Loose Women panellist Janet Street-Porter takes viewers on a trip down memory lane of her property history - including the castle she built in the heart of London.

Here are 8 things to learn about Janet:

1) Born Janet Bull in December 1946, Janet's parents owned a house in Parsons Green in west London, an area she recalls as being 'completely working class'. As her first stop on the journey through her property ladder, Janet reveals her electrical engineer dad and school dinner lady mum could only afford to live in half the house.

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2) Janet shared a bedroom with her sister at the back of the first floor, while the remainder of the two upper levels were rented out to another family. This included the only bathroom in the house, so Janet washed and bathed in the kitchen. Her parent's bedroom was situated on the ground floor. Today, the former bedroom and living room have been knocked into one open plan space.

3) The kitchen provokes many memories for Janet, specifically of the family life she hated so much. She explains how she thought 'you can't be my real parents. They just seemed like stone age people' and 'I thought my real parents would come along and get me - that my mother had picked up the wrong baby in the nursing home'. With life pretty much revolving around the radio, as it did for many people in the 1950s, Janet used to listen to Uncle Mac's Children's Favourites and wondered why 'all the requests were for posh kids'. She used to think 'no one's ever called Janet on this show. They've always got nice names - like Jennifer'.

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4) As a young teenager Janet spent a lot of time in the local library which was round the corner, or the museums in Kensington that were only a short bus ride away. During her teenage years, Janet's dad announced they were selling up and moving to Perivale out in suburbia along the A40 Western Avenue. He sold the Parsons Green house for £5,000. Today, similar houses fetch over £2 million. Despite moving, Janet continued to take the train to her old grammar school each day – an hour in each direction.

5) At the age of 19, Janet ran away from her parents home. She soon moved into a council flat in Fulham within close distance of Chelsea football stadium. This is the next stop on Janet's journey and where she 'became a double barrelled woman' marrying Tim Street-Porter. She recalls how the police broke down the front door looking for drugs while she was on her honeymoon, and took away her wedding cake 'but found nothing'. It is in this same flat that they installed a water bed but the motion made Janet 'violently sick'. Janet remembers putting her studies to become an architect on hold, and quickly getting a job writing for Petticoat Magazine, which eventually led to being offered a job at Daily Mail as deputy fashion editor.

6) Janet then revisits the first property she ever bought - a former barge repair shop in Limehouse on the banks of the River Thames, which she paid £25,000 for in 1971. 'The house faces south so you've got light all day long. It was just the most fantastic site,' she recalls. Janet installed a snooker table on the ground floor, which came in useful for when she staged a weekend long snooker party to celebrate the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977. There was a huge flotilla on the Thames and the Queen sailed by on a barge – Janet's party all waved. While she lived here, Janet's career was taking off and she first started presenting on LWT's Six O'clock Show.

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7) Although she loved her house by the river Thames, Janet had always wanted to build her own house. So in 1997 she and her architect friend Piers Gough set about finding a suitable site to build on. In the same year, they found the perfect corner plot in Clerkenwell to build Janet's dream representation of a medieval castle. Janet says her design statement was 'don't even bother ringing the doorbell, no visitors welcome'. It was a highly controversial design with a blue roof and odd shaped windows. The coloured brickwork design looks like a shadow has hit the building: 'It's such an achievement in brickwork it was on the cover of Brick Monthly.' Janet also installed her own version of a blue plaque on the outside – and believes unlike other modern buildings hers 'is a house that's really stood the test of time'. While living here, Janet was editor of The Independent, won a BAFTA for creating Network 7 for Channel 4 and became head of Youth Programmes at the BBC. Recalling her celebratory party for her BAFTA win, Janet says: 'I came home, and I was so drunk, I put the award on the second floor windowsill and it fell out the window and I never saw it again.'

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8) Eventually Janet's castle was dwarfed by new neighbouring buildings. She moved around the corner to a former warehouse that was being used as an artist's studio. Here, she added a new top floor, clad in glass, but the conversion was so costly she ran out of money - and she couldn't afford a kitchen. Janet mentioned this to her friend, famed musician and songwriter Elton John, when she was round at dinner – and he offered her his kitchen. It turns out Elton had a new chef who didn't like the units Elton had purchased, so they were left in boxes in the garage. Now they are installed in Janet's former kitchen. Janet stayed in this house for 15 years – until eventually the five floor trek from the kitchen at the top to the washing machine in the basement drove her mad and she had to move on. Janet currently has homes in Yorkshire and Kent and is on the lookout for a new London home.

Celebrity Home Secrets is a six-part series where famous faces revisit their former homes to share the memories and secrets from when they lived there. Tune in on Monday 12 September, 8pm, ITV1.

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